In our 181st episode, we got to chat with Ansley about her great dinosaur sculptures. You can see her work on her Instagram accounts ArtbyAnz and mcdansley or on Facebook at ArtbyAnz

Episode 181 is also about Archaeornithomimus an ornithomimosaur from Inner Mongolia that was mentioned in Jurassic World

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Colin Trevorrow says there won’t be any hybrid dinosaurs in Jurassic World 3 and that it will be a “science thriller in the same way that Jurassic Park was.”

The dinosaur of the day: Archaeornithomimus

Archaeornithomimus

Claire mentions Archaeornithomimus to Owen in Jurassic World

Ornithomimosaur that lived in the Cretaceous in what is now Inner Mongolia (Iren Dabasu Formation)

Found in 1923 during an American Museum of Natural History expedition, led by Roy Chapman Andrews (found theropod remains in three quarries)

Found several individuals, though not much of the skull

Described in 1933 by Charles Whitney Gilmore, as a new Ornithomimus species, Ornithomimus asiaticus

In 1972, Dale Russell renamed it Archaeornithomimus

Name means “ancient bird mimic”

Named ancient because Dale Russell thought it was 95 million years old (only about 70 million years old), which made it one of the oldest ornithomimids known at the time

Type species is Archaeornithomimus asiaticus (and only valid species)

Othniel Charles Marsh found foot bones in Maryland that he referred to Allosaurus medius. In 1911 those bones were named a new species of Dryptosaurus, Dryptosaurus grandis, and in 1920 Gilmore renamed them as a new species of Ornithomimus. Since Ornithomimus grandis was already named, he named it Ornithomimus affinis. Then in 1972 Russell renamed those bones as Archaeornithomimus affinis. However, in 1990 Smith and Galton found that those bones were not an ornithomimosaur, and were some other type of theropod

Lev Nesov named a third species of Archaeornithomimus in 1995, Archaeornithomimus bissektensis, based on a juvenile’s thighbone found in the Bissekty Formation in Uzbekistan. Though now, not everyone thinks this is actually a species of Archaeornithomimus

Gilmore did not assign a holotype specimen, so in 1990 David Smith and Peter Galton published a complete description of the fossils and named a lectotype

Skull not known, but probably was toothless and had a beak

May have been an omnivore (unclear because not enough known about the skull), which means it could have eaten small mammals, plants, fruit, eggs, and maybe hatchlings

About 11 ft (3.3 m) long and weighed up to 110 lb (50 kg)

Had long legs, and was fast, and had a long tail to help with balance

Other dinosaurs that lived at the same time and place include the tyrannosaur Alectrosaurus, maniraptorian Avimimus, oviraptorid Gigantoraptor, and dromaeosaurid Velociraptor

Fun Fact:

Despite the wide variety of ceratopsian ornamentation, “at no point were horns or frills completely lost in any ceratopsian lineage once established.”